All posts tagged presidential election

Ratings for Russian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin slipped in the last week, with three polls showing he would receive less than the 50% of votes necessary to avoid a second round of elections if a vote was held immediately.

A poll by the government-owned All Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or Vtsiom, showed 49% of voters would support Mr. Putin if a vote was held this Sunday, down from 52% a week ago. Read More »

Russian presidential hopeful Mikhail Prokhorov may be ranked among the country’s wealthiest businessmen, but he would barely make the rich-lists if judged by the assets listed on his official declaration of candidacy.

The owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team — who made his billions in metals and was recently approved to join the presidential ballot — did not list some of his most valuable assets on the declaration, according to the Vedomosti newspaper. These would include stakes in the world’s largest aluminum producer, UC Rusal PLC, as well as Polyus Gold International Ltd, the leading gold producer in Russia and Kazakhstan and brokerage firm Renaissance Capital.

While Mr. Prokhorov was valued at $18 billion last year by Forbes, making him the 3rd richest man in Russia, he would be worth around $2 billion if judged by the value of assets listed in his declaration of candidacy. Read More »

Recent polls suggest it’s unclear whether Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be able to gather enough votes in the March 4 presidential election to avoid a second round.

One poll shows Mr. Putin short of the 50% of the vote that’s required to avoid a runoff, while a state-owned polling agency showed support for Russia’s most powerful politician rising in the last month, with over half the population ready to back him in a future presidential vote, despite widely criticized parliamentary elections and anti-government protests in December.

The poll by the Public Opinion Fund showed that 45% of voters would support Mr. Putin in elections were held immediately–a result that would necessitate a second round of elections were it to happen during the actual vote on March 4. Read More »

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s support levels appeared to recover further in a recent poll, just two weeks after his approval tumbled to a career low following widely criticized parliamentary elections and national protests. Putin’s approval rating rose to 57% on a poll conducted Dec. 24 and Dec. 25 by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, which is owned by the government. That’s higher than the approval rating 54% on Dec. 17-18 and the record low of 51% on Dec. 10-11. That low came after a 10 percentage point slide in Mr. Putin’s approval following the Dec. 4 elections, widely criticized by opponents. Mr. Putin says the vote represented the real choice of the electorate. Read More »

Alexei Kudrin is making his Internet debut. The former Russian finance minister, who lost his job earlier this year after a spat with President Dmitry Medvedev has launched a website and Twitter account, just days after speaking at last weekend’s massive anti-government protest.

Mr. Kudrin said he disagrees with the results of Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, which the Kremlin’s opposition alleges were rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. He has offered to act as an intermediary between protestors and the government. (Mr. Putin says the election reflects the real view of the electorate, and election officials have said any isolated infractions would be investigated.) Read More »

Does the size of a crowd matter? Only if you’re trying to gauge the stability of Vladimir Putin’s rule and test the strength of the opposition.

After the historic Dec. 10 protest against parliamentary elections, no one could agree on the number of people who attended, and commentators with different political views cited widely varying figures to support their views of the importance of the event. Publicly available aerial photos were limited, and some international publications could only report that “tens of thousands” convened in and around Bolotnaya Square that day. Read More »

Moscow protesters voiced complaints on Saturday about the Kremlin leadership and parliamentary elections many saw as riddled with fraud. The protest rally, which attracted tens of thousands, followed another large demonstration two weeks earlier.

Maria Kurganskaya, 38, educator, served as an observer during the elections: “During the last parliamentary elections I was an observer and personally saw how 600 votes were given to United Russia. I think my vote has been stolen.” Ms. Kurganskaya wore a mask that read, “My vote has been stolen.” Read More »

The following is a translation from Russian of former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s speech at a protest rally in Moscow that attracted tens of thousands on Saturday. Mr. Kudrin was ousted as finance minister by President Dmitry Medvedev after he criticized plans to boost government spending on the military. “I am here today because I am for fair elections. I don’t agree with the results and think that everybody who was responsible for it should be held accountable, to the point of criminal liability.” Read More »

The organizers of the wave of anti-Kremlin protests in Russia have relied on Internet services like Facebook and Twitter to moblize tens of thousands of supporters. But the online tools have at times been a mixed blessing.

A dispute over what to do with the results of an Internet poll on who should speak at Saturday’s rally in Moscow triggered angry disputes at a meeting of organizers that ran until midnight Thursday (the disputes were webcast live).

Critics accused organizers of trying to “falsify” the results and compared them to the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, whom many blamed for the widespread fraud alleged in the Dec. 4 parliamentary vote. Anger over that election sparked the demonstrations, the largest in over a decade. Read More »

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